


beatification

by theonlytwin



Category: The Exorcist (TV)
Genre: Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-21
Updated: 2018-05-24
Packaged: 2019-05-09 20:53:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 5,081
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14723417
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theonlytwin/pseuds/theonlytwin
Summary: It's pretty hard, being married to God.





	1. SERVUS DEI

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> servant of god

He hears God first when he is very young, and hiding under a couch.

It’s dark, under the couch, a sort of low triangular tomb of dust and stray hairs. 

He’s got blood in his eyes and his heart is pounding, but he’s safe under the couch. 

His dad can’t lift the couch. 

Marcus is small. His mother isn’t small enough to fit. He can hear the violence, so he covers his ears. 

God speaks to him.

***

For the first 10 months after his parents died, Marcus Keane hears nothing.

Absolutely nothing at all.

There wasn’t, apparently, any medical reason for it. 

Shock, was written in longhand on his form, under deaf and orphan typed.

That’s when he starts drawing. Trees arching over title pages of textbooks, snakes coiled up under his arithmetic, bird wings in the condensation on the shower tiles. 

People tap him on the shoulder or slap him around the head to get his attention, and he can understand half of what he’s told to do from context. He can talk, but he can’t hear himself talk. 

His head is quiet, empty. He’s null and void. He cries sometimes, but he can’t hear it. 

It’s lonely, and peaceful.

***

He woke up one bright grey summer morning, earlier even than they woke them, in that home, and could hear the world.

The breath of the two dozen other boys in the room, the rattle of an unmuffled engine in the street, someone down the hall hawking up and spitting - clear as anything.

He held his hands over his ears, for a moment, heard his own heart pounding. His empty ears, his killing hands. His whole body shook. He heaved in a breath, two, tears leaking down his face. He could hear the wheeze in his lungs. 

“Keane’s crying again,” said someone.

“Fuck off!” he yelled, “Just fuck off!”

The boy from the bunk above flopped down to face him. “Thought you were deaf.”

He had been. He had almost figured out lip reading, too. 

“Not anymore, so fuck off!”

The boy rolled his eyes, and sat up again. “It’s a fucking miracle,” he says, out of sight.

***

Later, Marcus would realise that his life would have been extremely different if he had stayed deaf, or kept the secret of his hearing. 

But by that point, he’s set on his path of life, can barely imagine an alternative, so.

***

Marcus gets sold to the church when he’s ten. He meets a demon when he’s twelve. First tattoo at thirteen. He becomes a deacon at seventeen, takes orders at eighteen. It’s not normal, but neither is he.

What he is, is useful.

***

Spending your adolescence in a series of cells with demons from hell and priests from Belfast instead of playing football and getting hand shandies from bottle blondes behind bike sheds means that you learn pretty fast what you actually like, and want.

When Simon Crensell, the new kid, tells his story about the bike shed, Marcus doesn’t give a shit about the purported massiveness of her knockers. He’s staring straight at Simon’s pink mouth, thinking he’d like to make him shut up, thinking of a pretty easy method as to how.

He doesn’t, because Simon, despite his bright eyes and nice lips, is a bit of a git, and certainly not worth the fuss he’d probably make over it. 

The other thing about spending your adolescence as above is that you learn pretty fast what most people think of you. 

“You’re a little fucking faggot, aren’t you, Marky boy?”

“Keane, you’re a smart cunt, and you’ll stay in your place.”

“It’ll do you good to learn when to keep that mouth shut. But you don’t want to shut it, do you, lad? You’re gagging for it.”

“You’re worth as much as you can work, boy, and no more.”

So - he works. He’s good. He gets better. He’s a faggot, a smart cunt, he runs his mouth, but if he keeps working - if he makes himself pure, saves souls and banishes demons - there’s nothing anyone can say that matters. 

He’s got the final word, and the word flows through him, and the word is God.

*** 

He already knew the Latin - no priests could ever fault him on something his mother had drilled into him from when he was knee high to a gnat. 

He had already seen death, had already lost everything.

He had already rejected and refound his faith in God, which, as far as he can tell, most men two or three times his age have never thought that hard about. 

Marcus Keane was streets ahead of all the other trainee exorcists even before he banishes his first demon.

*** 

God speaks to him.

God doesn’t speak to Simon, or Danny, or Father Sean. Marcus doesn’t want a bottle blonde, or a soft bed, or all the whiskey in the world. He thirsts only to hear that voice - if voice is the right word - the noise, the massive, pressing noise, the focus of hearing, and knowing, of seeing something not meant to be seen, but more importantly, of being seen. Of being heard and known, known right down to the bones, every part of him, no shadows, no hiding. To feel God’s grace.

He doesn’t - it isn’t words, when God speaks. It’s like: a song from a waking dream. The smell of burning dry grass, but sound. The radiance of sunlight travelling across many waters, from a great distance. It’s knowledge - instinct. Ineffable.

Marcus wants to be a vessel for God’s grace, and God wants him. God loves him. 

So, yeah, he thinks about kissing boys sometimes, and he answers back a lot. God doesn’t give a fuck. Marcus knows this for certain.


	2. VENERABILIS

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> heroic in virtue

No one likes him, but they need him, which is enough. 

He doesn’t take a parish, or hear confession, or officiate a damn thing. That’s not what he’s for. He travels. He says the words. He hears God. He takes communion. He sees death. He hears curses. He works. 

Simon gets his skull crushed by the monster hiding in a little boy. Danny runs away. Father Sean dies of a cirrhosis. Father Patrick after him commits suicide. 

The church changes faces. 

God is his constant companion - that’s who he promised to love and honour and obey.

He shares his life with God. The only kind of marriage a man like him can have.

***

Marcus is very good at relationships in short bursts, he realises. 

The duration of an exorcism, usually, and a few days or weeks after. As long as he’s needed. 

Augustine said that you cannot love love unless you love a lover - and Marcus loves many. 

He picks up languages, names, secrets, dreams. Niv tells him about his hopes of a big family - twins run on his mother’s side, and he wants to adopt. Aminat’s going to be a doctor, when she grows up. Hardish will travel. Javier wants to be on a telenovela. Gorji wants to own a lot of dogs. 

He collects traumas too. They crop up in the middle of the night, during the next exorcism, on a long drive. Families battered, animals eviscerated, limbs twisted beyond recognition, pus and blood and gasping breaths. They appear to him as sense memories, and he weaves them together with his own experiences, into a blanket that weighs him down, reminds him of what he’s for.

He stays in a place for as long as he’s needed, until he’s needed somewhere else.

***

“You want him?” a demon asks, from the body of a man. 

Jeremy Murray, 21, a builder’s assistant and union organiser who started acting dodgy a month or so ago. Someone in his family had thought it was rabies, but his grandmother had known it was worse.

“I want him safe and whole,” Marcus tells it, winding his rosary around his fist.

“You want to fuck him?”

“Get a new tune,” Marcus says, pressing a crucifix to Jeremy Murray’s hissing flesh. 

A while later, it says, “He hates you. He hates queers. If his family knew, they’d throw you out.”

“If I only helped people who liked me, I’d be retired. Besides, God loves us both well enough to make up for it.”

It uses Jeremy’s mouth to leer at him. “You don’t really believe that, do you Marky boy? It’s just a story your mam told you when you were little. God loves you, so don’t you worry - look where that got her.”

Marcus flicks holy water at his mother’s voice, and it screams. 

“Look where it got me,” he hisses, “here, with the power to destroy you.”

He says the words. Grace flows through him. The creature flees. Jeremy survives.

He survives but doesn’t say a word when his brother beats Marcus bloody, for looking queer as much as refusing to offer an explanation about what happened other than the truth.

Because this is a fucking village in Somerset, he ends up getting tended to by the local C of E vicar.

“They’re good people, at heart,” says Henderson, dabbing Betadine on his cheek. “It’s just - they get overwhelmed by things they don’t understand.”

“Is this in reference to that big lad calling me a queen, or to do with the demon I shooed out of his brother?”

Henderson sighs. “Thank you. I don’t think anyone else in town has said it, or even knows to say it, but if you hadn’t - done what you did, he would have died.”

Marcus tips his chin back. Henderson is, like Jeremy, very handsome. Marcus looks at his big hands, delicately holding the cotton swabs, at his sad and patient eyes, and thinks, if he really wanted, he could probably kiss Vicar Henderson.

“Thank you,” Marcus tells him. “You took me in, knowing the risks.”

“Oh, I think they’ll forgive me.” Henderson shrugs. “No one’s burnt a Catholic around here in ages.”

I am my beloved’s, and my beloved is mine.

Marcus doesn’t kiss him, but he does laugh.

***

He met Devon Bennett at forty and hated him. 

He was polished and political and had the patronage of a Cardinal. He’s a decent exorcist, but so fucking smooth, in a way Marcus can never be.

By forty-one, he kind of likes Bennett. But only kind of. He’s still political, but has proven himself to be more fucking ethical than maybe ninety percent of Vatican City.

What happens is: Marcus goes to a town in Patagonia to investigate claims of possessed children. In the course of his investigation, however, he realises that their strange behaviour and abhorrence of the church was caused by a depressingly human evil. 

It’s not the first pedophile priest Marcus has met. Likely won’t be the last. 

Bennet uses his connections to excommunicate Father Fabo, and then backdates the excommunication to before Marcus broke both his wrists.

“Why did you do that?” Marcus asks.

Bennett gives him the same smooth look he always has, then slowly raises an eyebrow. “Because I believe in justice below, as above.”

Bennett may be kind of a prick, but he has good faith, good morals, and if anyone’s going to be polished and political, Marcus wants it to be someone like him.

***

He hears God less and less as he gets older. 

Figures, for a week and a half, that he doesn’t need it as much. That he knows what he’s doing. Marcus has never lost a sufferer. He’s the Vatican’s most successful exorcist, he doesn’t need further instruction.

Then he gets told what for during a friendly theological debate with a Sister Mary Seavis, and thinks he’s become too arrogant. He needs to learn humility. He asks for forgiveness. He quits smoking, teases the sisters less. He waits, for a word, a whisper, that empyrean touch.

***

It all flows back during the next exorcism, as though it never left, and Marcus wonders what he was worried about. The one after that goes just as well, and he takes calls from Bennett as he climbs the political ladder, he gets emails from Gorji and Hardish. He lives in the light. He figures he’ll do this forever. 

***

He fails Gabriel. He can’t hear God, but he hears his own weeping, dogs howling.


	3. LATAE SENTENTIAE

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sentence already passed.

He fights for a funeral mass. 

He fights to have Gabriel interred in consecrated ground. He helps dig the hole himself.

He does not attend the service. 

***

He is in a bar fight in Mexico, punching a man who looks nothing like his father.

***

He is sweating alcohol in a cell in Texas.

***

He is swearing bitterly at a bishop. 

***

“Have you lost your faith in our Lord?” asks Mother Marie in New Orleans.

“I think he’s lost faith in me,” Marcus tells her.

She shakes her head. “For shame, my brother. You can’t really think that.”

“I don’t know,” Marcus says, and starts crying, “I don’t know what to think.”

***

He ends up in Saint Aquinas in Illinois, with all the other broken priests. 

He hates them. He hates the group therapy. He hates his dead white room. 

He prays, and hears: nothing.


	4. PROMOTOR FIDEI

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> advocate of faith

He meets Tomas Ortega at fifty-three and fucking hates him. 

He’s soft and scared and has a parish in Chicago. He’s so fucking fresh, in a way Marcus never was.

Father Tomas comes to his cell with his name and a song no one should know. Marcus feels an untested heart beat rabbit fast under the fist he has in his shirt.

This man says the words as Marcus says them, as if he’s hearing them from on high - and - and Marcus rejects him in a rage. 

“This is what you send me?” he roars, to the silence.

***

Marcus has always liked going through people’s things. It’s useful, obviously, but also a little like a postcard from a far off land: this is the view from normal life. 

A handwritten card to Uncle Tomas on the fridge. Pictures of his sister, his nephew on the mantel. So many clothes, which Marcus has never understood. Novels, books of poetry in English and Spanish. Con Air and Honeymoon in Vegas, so he has excellent taste in terrible films. 

Marcus finds his love letters - even here, Father Tomas is almost terribly normal. He’s sentimental, an innocent, practically prelapsarian. 

He might be absolutely useless. He might be the most important thing that’s happened to Marcus since God first spoke to him. It’s hard to tell.

***

The exorcism of the Rance family is the hardest of his life. At the end of it, he’s exhausted, and not only because he lost a lot of blood. Maybe partly because he didn’t actually do any exorcism.

He had walked away from the Pope’s procession, quietly hotwired a car, driven at full speed to the house, found - ambulances.

Not corpses, or screaming wind, not barking dogs, or weeping. 

He finds Tomas Ortega, bloodied but standing straight. Henry and Casey holding hands. Angela’s eyes flickering from a gurney, Kat insisting that they travel together. 

“Marcus!” Casey runs to him. 

He holds her, and he holds Tomas’ gaze over her shoulder. 

***

At the hospital, in between calls to Bennett and Tara, they tell each other everything - about the ashes and Simon and Angela. 

He’s not used to telling people things, and there’s no particularly tactical reason to do it - but it’s good to make sense of these few days. 

“Your _crucifix?_ ”

“Had to improvise, didn’t I?”

Tomas shakes his head a little. “That’s - not - it’s like something out of the apocrypha. With this crucifix, Saint Marcus Keane slays the demon as it was about to strike.”

Marcus squints at him. “I’m not exactly gunning for a sainthood. Don’t think they canonize people after they’ve been excommunicated.”

“They have.” Tomas tips his head. “And I think maybe the Holy Father owes you a favour?”

Marcus waves it away. Instead, he tells Tomas about Sister Bernadette. They mourn her. He tells Marcus about the vision the demon gave him, to convince him to commit suicide. Marcus congratulates him on overcoming it.

“I thought about love - my family,” Tomas says, “My church.” Marcus nods - typical Tomas sentimentality. “I thought - Marcus would be so furious if I just gave up.”

He laughs at this. “I would have been livid.”

Tomas grins.

***

He’s the one who exorcised the integrated Angela Rance. Sentimental, sure - but stubborn. Strong.

He’s certainly not useless. He’s perhaps a little frightening.

Marcus wants to see what he becomes.

So when Tomas asks Marcus to teach him - and others have asked before - he agrees.

***

It takes less than a week for Bennett to call with a new case and a warning that they should travel untraceably.

“You don’t have to come,” Marcus tells him. “If you want to reconsider.”

“I’m coming,” Tomas says, and doesn’t even hesitate. 

He leaves his normal life, most of his clothes, in boxes. 

***

He’s shit at driving, good at washing clothes in a sink, excellent at sweet talking strangers, unless they’re racist. 

They exorcise a man in Memphis. Tomas is terrified, and determined.

“Is it always like this?” he asks, as he fumbles his collar. He’s probably always had people helping him. He’s probably never had to put on liturgical dress while someone screamed about whores in the next room.

“It’s always intimidating. But it’s always different,” Marcus says, and then, “let me.” He fixes the tabs, drapes Tomas’ stole. 

After, they go to a laundromat to wash sweat and bile and blood from their clothes. 

“Machine washable stoles now? Modern wonders will never cease.”

Tomas shrugs. “I’ve had holy wine spilled on me more than once. Excitable altar servers. Parishioners with impaired motor control.”

“And now, sulphuric vomit,” Marcus says.

Tomas rolls his eyes, a little - the closest thing to light hearted he’s been since they got here. 

Marcus bumps their shoulders together and they watch the clothes spin around.

***

They perform two more exorcisms, live in shockingly ugly motel rooms, make fun of local newspapers, and drink a lot of coffee of varying quality. 

Marcus had thought he might get sick of spending this much time with one person - he’s lived communally almost his whole life, but he’s never had a partner.

Tomas snores a bit, sings along to the radio with a fine voice. He likes bad movies and old books. He works, gets better, makes himself useful. He drinks one or two beers, no more. He orders salads. They pray together sometimes, apart others. He fixes Tomas’ collar and Tomas tells him when his shirt has weird stains. He finds it easy to get Tomas’ attention, and to give him his - touching on the shoulder or arm or the back of the head, a gentler version of his youth. They fit into each other’s space like they’ve always been there.

He’s impossible to hate for long - sometimes Marcus is still angry at him, worried for him, but never sick of him. 

***

They stay in a parish guest room in Florida after a false alarm - the girl was just a girl, as they often are - angry and lonely but no monster.

“I’m sorry,” says Father Omar. “We’ve got the one bed and the couch.”

“I’ll take the couch,” Tomas says, just as Marcus slings his bag at it.

They look at each other.

“You’re taller, you should take the bed,” Tomas tells him.

“I’m more used to sleeping on couches than you.”

“So you’ve earned a bed.”

Omar shrugs. “They’re both fine.”

“I’m sure I’ll be very comfortable on the couch,” Tomas tells him, warmly.

Omar glances at Marcus, nods, retreats. 

Tomas shakes out the sheet Omar left them. Marcus watches the sheet settle over his bag.

“You were fine with me on the couch in your apartment.”

“That was my apartment.” Tomas straightens and folds his arms. “Where, you remember, I had never actually invited you.”

Marcus grins. “I was a stranger, and you took me in.”

Tomas raises an eyebrow. “Jesus wasn’t talking about breaking and entering.”

“I picked the lock! I didn’t break anything.”

“The law?”

“Oh,” Marcus waves a hand, “that.”

He tucks his chin the way he does when he’s hiding a laugh. “How long will it take us to get to Ohio?”

“Maybe two days.” 

“And you won’t let me drive until you’re exhausted.”

“It’s very stressful, your driving.”

“So, you should get some rest,” Tomas says, and hands him his bag with finality, “in your bed.”

Marcus tips his head. “Can I ask why this is the hill you’ve picked to die on?”

Tomas sighs, picks up a pillow. “You,” he gestures, awkwardly, puts the pillow at the head of the couch. “You want me to have the bed. Because you think I’m - soft.”

Well. He’s not wrong.

“And you want me to have the bed because I’m - old?” He’s trying to joke.

“I’ve seen you sleep on the ground,” Tomas says, unamused.

Marcus rubs the back of his head, thinking. “Look. You left your life. You’ve performed exorcisms. I know you’re not - in this for the glamour. I know you’re not faking it. You’re dedicated. You’re devoted.”

He watches at Tomas, who’s still looking uncertain - like something has to be negotiated. 

“But you still - try to shelter me. I don’t need it. The demons didn’t scare me away. The couch certainly won’t.”

Marcus holds his hands out. “Tomas, you are still new to this. All of this. It’s never going to be easy, or comfortable. You should take what you can get.”

“So should you,” Tomas says, and sits on the couch.

Marcus looks at him, and laughs. “Alright. Alright.”

They take turns brushing their teeth. Marcus takes a shower. When he gets out, he leans over the couch, planning to ask if he’s changed his mind, but - Tomas is already asleep. 

He looks like it took him unawares: one arm above his head, his face turned into his elbow, sheet held in a loose fist to his chest. He needs a shave, and maybe a haircut, probably more sleep than he’s going to get, tonight. 

Marcus slips quietly into bed - soft, clean, cotton sheets, white as new snow. 

He matches his breaths to Tomas’ - an old trick, but effective. He falls asleep thanking God for this moment.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This might have happened in other cases, but Tomas is specifically thinking about Mother Mary MacKillop of the Cross: ran a stack of schools and welfare orgs for the poor in rural Australia and NZ, famous for spending lots of time forgiving sex workers for their sins, briefly excommunicated technically for insubordination but reallyfor refusing to back down when she accused a priest of molesting children and the church just was not acknowledging that shit at all! She was re-instated to her position because a) a bishop insisted on it from his deathbed and b) she did the work of a dozen people and no one else could replace her. Died of natural causes in 1909, canonized in 2010. She is my favourite saint and now she’s yours. Google a photo of her: she has the most incredible face.


	5. VISIO BEATIFICA

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> blessed vision

After the boy in Columbus - a few years older than Gabriel will ever be - Tomas sinks onto the edge of his shitty motel bed.

“It’s so - it’s so exhausting, but part of me wants to - to go right out and find more people to help.”

Marcus opens the window, to air out the stink of them, but keeps the blinds down, because he can’t bear the sight of the parking lot just now.

“I warned you, didn’t I?” He leans against the wall, watches Tomas, mostly a silhouette, run his hands through his hair.

“Is this what addiction is like?”

“It’s only addiction if you do it for selfish reasons. I’ve met priests like that - hooked on the power.”

“It’s not the power,” he says, “I’m just thinking - there’s so many people who need help. Why should I sit here when so many people need help?”

“Because you’re exhausted. You just said you were. And you’re no good to anyone sleepwalking.”

He nods, half smiling, half chagrined. He looks up at Marcus, all trust.

The lifting and falling light as the curtain moves in the wind catches Tomas’ tired face, makes his hair a flickering halo. 

Marcus wants to watch him, perhaps forever.

“I’m gonna get some dinner,” Marcus says, and straightens. “You have a nap.”

“Thank you,” Tomas says, stretching out on the bed. 

Marcus wants to take his shoes off so he’s more comfortable.

Marcus leaves quickly.

***

When he comes back, Tomas is snoring on top of the covers. Shoes are still on.

 _He’s not even my type_ , Marcus thinks, watching Tomas sleep. He’s always liked men a little older and broader, more Burt Reynolds than this - this golden boy, wide eyed and charming up until he’s stubbornly refusing to listen to reason, with his neat hands and hard arms and his whole highly expressive face.

He’s got the kind of passion, the kind of gravitas, that meant in another life he’d have been a martyr, a saint.

“Wakey wakey,” he kicks the end of the bed. “Ohio’s answer to texmex is getting cold.”

Tomas stirs, rubs his eyes - eyes like doves, soft and bright, deep and brimming with meaning. 

He smiles a sleepy smile.

 _Oh,_ Marcus thinks, _I’m fucking fucked, aren’t I?_

***

This conscious realisation kicks off something.

He dreams often and vividly. His arms around Tomas, both of them fully clothed and crouching by a brick wall, but tender with each other, comfortable. Following Tomas up a steep and thorny path, trusting him to guide the way. Taking communion from Tomas’ hand. Offering a cup to Tomas’ mouth. Settling his face into Tomas’ throat. 

He finds himself arguing a little harder, a little more than he really needs to. 

He wonders if he’d be easier on Tomas if he cared about him less. 

He prays, asking for guidance. _Why this man? Is he my partner or my replacement? Why do I want him? Why does he sing in the shower?_

If he listens hard enough, he can make the shape of Tomas out from the sound of water bouncing off his body. 

***

Marcus prides himself on being able to read people, but he has absolutely no idea what would happen if he kissed Tomas. 

Whether he’d be repulsed, or full of pity, or thrilled. 

Marcus does know it would probably end badly - both because demons would have a fucking field day and because Marcus has never had a proper date with a person in his entire life - but the impulse isn’t - his mind stops him before he thinks any further than kissing. 

He wants to kiss Tomas.

He won’t kiss Tomas. 

They have too much to do.

He just watches him sleep, instead. 

***

Cindy’s exorcism - the first since his little revelation - scares the shit out of him. 

The demon asks him what he wants. The demon calls Tomas beautiful. 

Marcus puts his trust in Tomas, puts himself between Tomas and violence, and Tomas? Does the worst possible thing.

Tomas has been scaring Marcus for months. 

The visions make it so much worse. 

They succeed with Cindy by the skin of their fucking teeth.

Tomas calls it a win, because he’s callow, stubborn, _stupid_.

Marcus gets a call, and starts them on the road to Seattle.

***

This can’t be anything but a manipulation - something drawing Tomas into its trust, so as to destroy him all the better. 

_Like you are,_ says a bitter whisper as he watches Tomas twitch in his sleep in the passenger seat.

It’s not the fucking same, he knows. 

He needs Tomas to be - safe. His soul deserves glory. And if Marcus has to remind them both that he’s an _apprentice_ to make that happen - he will.

“Sweet dreams?” he asks, when Tomas shakes himself awake.

***

Harper Graham is not possessed. 

She’s scared, and her mother is a monster, but Marcus understands a variety of human and non-human monsters extremely well. 

He holds her face, he tells Harper, “You are clean. You are pure. You are a child of God and there is nothing wrong with you.” 

She’s shaking, sweating, and he’s been where she is. “You will know exactly who you are.” 

Harper opens her eyes and screams. Lorraine is wielding a hammer that already has blood on it and if Tomas is dead Marcus has no idea what he’ll do. 

He tells Harper to hide her eyes, and fights.

***

All their wounds are defensive, and Lorraine has a history, so the police are fine. Harper is fine. Marcus has one deep cut. Tomas has a concussion, a great deal of guilt.

He gives his partner chips and has a pocket full of pain pills for later. 

***

Nachburn is cursed, and Marcus should have known it.

***

Peter is lovely, and Marcus doesn’t deserve him.

***

He shoots Andy Kim in the head, and for a long, awful moment, hears nothing.

His hollow ears, his killing hands. 

Tomas struggles upright. 

He looks at Andy’s corpse, horrified. Marcus looks down. 

“Oh,” Tomas says, and that’s the first thing Marcus hears. It all comes rushing in at once - the distant sirens and tinnitus and disaster.

“Come on,” Mouse says, hand on his shoulder. 

Marcus can’t move. 

Tomas gets close, takes the gun from his hand, wraps his fingers around Marcus’. 

“Marcus. I’m sorry.” He’s gotten gunshot residue on his hand, probably, and is sharing it with Tomas. 

Tomas touches the side of his face. His voice drops. “I’m sorry. We have to go.”

Tomas squeezes his hand. 

I love you, Marcus thinks, and then, I need to leave.

He nods.

***

He leaves. 

If he stays - he can’t stay.

The last time he killed a man, it was for love, and fear. This remains true, but he’s not a child any more. He’s an exorcist. He has rules.

He must put duty before self - and he killed Andy Kim for the wrong reason.

In the motel room - another empty motel room - he draws the curtains against the sunlight because he can’t bear the brightness, and knows he killed Andy to spare himself Tomas’ death.

He’s lost God. He thought he could keep Tomas, but that’s - not how this works. No matter how much he’d like it to.

He can’t reward himself for failing.

Tomas comes in, patient and supportive, and when Marcus tells him he’s leaving - shattered.

That’s not what he expected. He’s not sure what he expected. 

He shakes Tomas’ hand, and it was meant to be just that, but Tomas pulls him in, throws them together. 

Stubborn.

Marcus holds him, breathes him in, lets him go. 

“Not forever,” Tomas asks - pleads, “just for now?”

He can’t - look at him. If he looks at him - there’s no telling. 

“For now.”

He shuts the door, quietly. 

He tells Mouse to look after him, and herself. 

He leaves. 

***

Work is - surprisingly easy to find, if you don’t care about working conditions or pension plans. 

Marcus barely cares about anything, anymore.

Weeks pass in a lonely, peaceful blur. 

***

One bright grey spring morning, Marcus watches the sun come up.

The forest is massive and complex, visually baffling after spending hours staring at the fiberglass hull. 

Water slips between the boats and their moorings, and there’s the gentle thump of a buoy against the pier.

Marcus listens.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> and then season 3 happens and it’s v good and interesting - Marcus meets lots of exorcists from lots of religions, Tomas gets some great character development and maybe some stigmata, Mouse gets a massage and perhaps makes out with someone nice? and! an exorcised Bennet becomes pope and his first papal edict is saying that the church is gonna stop being dumb about contraception/abortion/homosexuality/celibacy, in fact the church is refocusing its efforts on what it was always good for: helping the poor and commissioning art. Marcus and Tomas tenderly touch foreheads. probably Marcus kisses Tomas’ hand while he’s on a hospital bed or something. it’s so gr8 and definitely not cancelled.

**Author's Note:**

> thanks to kvikindi, boppinrobin and velarapproximant for beta/god chat


End file.
